Prudence Penn: 'He was a heaven-sent consort in every way’
Lady Penn was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother
There has been an avalanche of praise for the life and work of Prince Philip, and rightly so. In the summer of 1947, I met him for the first time and was immediately struck by the physical perfection of this fair-haired young man – such a complement to the beauty of Princess Elizabeth.
He was one of the most practical men I have ever met. He was intensely interested in so many things, always curious to know more and, if possible, to make improvements. On one occasion he dropped in for lunch with me at my house in Scotland en route to a carriage-driving event. It so happened that a few days before, I had broken my leg and it was in plaster. I had been trapped in my walled garden, the door having jammed, and the only way I could think to escape was to climb onto a low stone wall and jump down the other side – a drop of about 10 feet. It was the wrong decision.
When he arrived, I was standing at the top of the steps up to my front door. I said: ‘How lovely to see you, sir. I am afraid I cannot curtsy.’ He turned round as if to leave and said: ‘In that case, perhaps I had better go.’ It was the kind of remark for which he was sometimes criticised by people who didn’t fully understand his sense of humour.
After lunch he wanted to inspect the scene of the accident and, in his usual practical way, explained to me how I should have handled the situation: ‘Never launch yourself off a high wall, turn around to face it holding the top and lower yourself with your hands.’ With hindsight, of course, he was right.
Being with him was always interesting and fun. On that same occasion he told me all about the dreadful fire that had recently destroyed a large area of the State Apartments at Windsor Castle. He was in charge of the restoration programme and was responsible for detailed planning such as finding the wonderfully talented team who did such a magnificent job. Any task he took on, he tackled with enthusiasm and skill. In many ways, I always felt that there were great similarities between him and his predecessor Prince Albert, the prince consort. I actually said that to him at the time and he decried it. I think I was right.
I loved the way he would boost the Queen’s ego by telling her how lovely she looked on their way to an engagement. He knew how to bring the best out of a woman, and I am sure his advice and encouragement to her were paramount in their relationship. To my mind, the Duke of Edinburgh was a heaven-sent consort for Her Majesty in every way.
He had always wanted to have a lower-key funeral than that which was ordained for him, and due to current circumstances he got his wish. It was a funeral that proved to be one of the most moving, fitting and memorable occasions.
Philip Eade: 'An officer and a gentleman'
Philip Eade is the author of 'Young Prince Philip'
In the almost seven decades after his wife became Queen, Prince Philip saw 15 prime ministers come – and 14 go – and carried out a scarcely imaginable 22,219 solo public engagements, a relentless round of unexciting walkabouts that any less resilient a character would have given up on years ago.
When he turned 99 last June, he became the first man in the British Royal Family to reach his 100th year. He was comfortably Britain’s longest-serving royal consort, surpassing by 12 years the record previously held by Queen Charlotte, who was consort to King George III from their marriage in 1761 until her death in 1818.
Shortly before retiring from public duties in 2017, Philip quipped that he was probably the world’s most experienced plaque unveiler. When the mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah told him how sorry he was to hear that the prince was standing down, Philip shot back: ‘Well, I can’t stand up much longer!’
As one of the most enduring public servants this country has ever seen, he had every right to remark, as he did with characteristic understatement in a television interview on the eve of his 90th birthday: ‘I reckon I’ve done my bit.’
Not always recognised is the extent of the sacrifices his marriage to the Queen entailed. When the pair wed in 1947, King George VI, then 51, was expected to reign for at least another 20 years. In the meantime, Prince Philip was intent on continuing with his service in the Royal Navy – where he was regarded as one of its finest young officers, tipped to reach the highest rank – while enjoying a relatively carefree private life ashore. But the premature death, in 1952, of his father-in-law, who had lung cancer, precluded all this. The change in the prince’s life was always going to come, but barely five years into his marriage, and aged just 30, was too soon for such a headstrong alpha male to give up his beloved naval career and slip happily into his new role of walking a yard behind his wife at public functions, emitting only the odd mischievous aside.
While the new Queen possessed an abundance of qualities that would make her an exceptionally good monarch, Prince Philip’s restless energy and strident opinions made him rather less obviously cut out to play the supporting role, required to address his wife as ‘Ma’am’ in public and bow whenever she entered a room. While the Queen mourned her father, the prince grieved for the end of his free life, and the next few years were to be bruising ones for him as he struggled to find a new sense of purpose.
Among the first to appreciate his predicament was his mother, Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark, a hugely courageous character who had been born with congenital hearing loss, served as a heroic Florence Nightingale-style frontline nurse during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when Philip was eight (resulting in her spending several years in a secure psychiatric clinic). She later hid a Jewish family from the Gestapo in occupied Athens, earning, like Oskar Schindler, Israel’s award of Righteous Among the Nations.
‘All my thoughts are with you in this sad loss,’ his mother wrote to Philip on hearing the king had died. ‘I think much of the change in your life this means. It means much more personal self-sacrifice, as I am fully aware, but every sacrifice brings its own reward in a manner we cannot foresee. Such has been my experience in my own life with its many ups and downs.’
Habitually lively, Prince Philip spent the first few months of his wife’s reign in profoundly low spirits, his gloomy mood echoing Prince Albert’s despairing entry in his diary soon after his marriage to Queen Victoria: ‘Oh, the future!’ Comparisons were often made between Philip and his great-great-grandfather and predecessor as prince consort – also an instinctive moderniser with a keen interest in science and industry (Prince Philip was dubbed ‘the jet-age Prince Albert’). Yet the differences between their situations were far greater than any resemblances. While Albert had much to do as Queen Victoria’s secretary and adviser, Queen Elizabeth II inherited an effective department of state in which her husband had no entitlement to lighten her burden and was forever being warned by condescending courtiers against straying into affairs that were not his concern.
Unlike his predecessor, Prince Philip was barred from taking part in constitutional affairs or expressing any political opinions in public – although he was never afraid to indicate what he thought and, in private, the Queen has doubtless relied on his advice and encouragement. Rarely one to guard his tongue, he became famous for his diplomatic faux pas, as well as for sharp remarks to journalists and photographers, and volcanic explosions with his staff.
Frustration with his restricted role within the gilded cage may help explain the odd flash of fury. But equally significant was his harrowing upbringing as a scion of Europe’s most unstable monarchy. His paternal grandfather, King George I of Greece, had been born a Danish prince but in 1863 acceded as a teenager to the throne of Greece, where he remained until his assassination in 1913. Philip’s father, Prince Andrew, the slain king’s fourth son, came close to being executed during a colonels’ coup in 1922, when Philip was a year old. The family fled aboard a warship sent by King George V, Andrew’s cousin, who was anxious to atone for having failed to give sanctuary to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia – another cousin – in 1918.
They settled in Paris, where Philip went to his first school, but his world was soon thrown into turmoil when his mother was taken away by psychiatrists and his father abandoned the family home to live with his mistress. In the early 1930s, Philip was taken to visit his mother a handful of times and otherwise received only occasional letters and cards from her. From the age of 11 to 16, he neither saw nor heard from her. He was subsequently at pains to play down the effects of all this. ‘It’s simply what happened,’ he told one biographer. ‘The family broke up. My mother was ill, my [four elder] sisters were married, my father was in the South of France. I just had to get on with it.’
Boarding school offered the most obvious solution to the sudden dissolution of Philip’s family life. Packed off to prep school at Cheam in the UK, he was looked after during the shorter school holidays by his maternal grandmother, then by his Uncle Georgie (George, 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven), who acted as Philip’s guardian until he was 16. Georgie died from cancer aged just 45 – another in the series of blows to afflict the embattled young prince.
Philip had grown fond of both Georgie and his wife, Nada, and was extremely appreciative of the new home (Lynden Manor at Holyport, by the Thames) they provided for him. But it could never make up for the home that he had lost. When signing visitors’ books, he often wrote in the address column: ‘Of no fixed abode’. And years later, when an interviewer asked him what language he had spoken at home as a child, he snapped back: ‘What do you mean, at home?’
‘He never had the love,’ remarked a friend years later about the prince’s childhood. ‘There was no one really close – that day-to-day parental contact that you need to smooth off the rough edges. That’s where the rudeness comes from – not enough slap-down when it mattered.’
Gordonstoun, the radical new public school founded by Kurt Hahn on the Moray Firth, where Prince Philip moved aged 13, provided a substitute home. Hahn’s educational philosophy made a lasting impression on the young prince, instilling in him a spartan sense of duty and discipline, as well as his lifelong love of the sea. It was a fulfilling and happy time – Philip rose to become head boy – but soon another family tragedy struck.
In 1937, Philip’s 26-year-old sister Cecilie and her family were on their way to a wedding in London when their plane crashed, killing everyone on board. Philip, then 16, travelled out to the funeral in Germany, where he forlornly followed the coffins on foot – just as he would 60 years later with Princes William and Harry after the death of their mother. Emotionally hardened, perhaps, by his previous traumas, Philip reacted to the dreadful news about his sister ‘like a man’, according to his headmaster.
After the death of Georgie Milford Haven in 1938, the role of Philip’s chief mentor was assumed by Georgie’s younger brother, Lord Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten. It was Mountbatten who steered the young prince towards the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where in 1939 he engineered Philip’s first significant meeting with his 13-year-old third cousin, Princess Elizabeth, who was accompanying her parents on a royal visit.
Clearly smitten by the handsome blond prince, the princess felt sufficiently sure of her feelings by 1943 to tell her governess, Marion Crawford, that he was ‘the one’. Her father and mother, George VI and Queen Elizabeth, were at first reluctant to believe that their elder daughter had fallen for virtually the first man she had met, and there was considerable opposition to Philip among the more conservative old guard of courtiers, who would have far preferred the princess to marry someone from the higher flights of the British aristocracy. They thought Prince Philip ‘rather unpolished’; his demeanour was deemed a little Teutonic, his education at Gordonstoun dangerously progressive.
The prince scarcely went out of his way to win over his detractors, and his refusal to ingratiate himself was a big part of the reason why the young Princess Elizabeth fell in love with him, accustomed as she was to the fawning deference of palace servants. Having more royal blood in his veins than she did, he was also never going to be dazzled by her status, still less obsequious. ‘He was not all over her,’ one courtier observed, ‘and she found that very attractive.’ Less intimate acquaintances were occasionally surprised by the sharp words he directed towards her but, as a close friend of hers shrewdly observed, ‘Nothing makes a woman less happy than being able to get away with everything.’
Philip continued to exhibit a joshing attitude throughout his time as consort. It was intrinsic to his character and served as a release from the royal straitjacket. But behind the scenes he was a crucial support for the Queen, bolstering her confidence in private and acting as a more relaxed companion in public, enabling her to overcome her shyness in the same way her mother had with the stammering George VI. The young Queen found it far from easy to put people at ease, her conversational gambits a little stiff, her smile too controlled to be encouraging. Whenever the awkward possibility of silence loomed, Prince Philip was adept at sauntering up and saying something to diffuse the tension and allow conversation to flow. His breezy irreverence was evident even at formal dinners at Buckingham Palace, when he was apt to study a menu written in elaborate French and remark cheerily to the guests: ‘Ah, good. Fish and chips again.’
In 1957, Time magazine credited him ‘for the fact that his mousy, slightly frumpy and occasionally frosty bride has blossomed into a self-confidently stylish and often radiantly warm young matron’.
The earlier realisation that he could no longer pursue an active naval career and support his wife in carrying out her increasingly demanding duties was the one regret that he admitted to in later life. ‘It was not my ambition to be president of the Mint Advisory Committee,’ he told one interviewer. ‘I didn’t want to be president of the World Wildlife Fund. I was asked to do it. I’d much rather have stayed in the Navy, frankly.’
After the Queen’s accession in 1952, Prince Philip channelled his vigour into new responsibilities, becoming involved with numerous charitable organisations in which he felt he could make a worthwhile contribution – while also enduring a good deal of hostility for his pains. When he first proposed the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, designed to help young people to mature by requiring them to tackle a variety of challenges, one supremely tactless government minister remarked: ‘I hear you’re trying to invent something like the Hitler Youth.’ For a man who had just risked his life fighting for Britain in the war, it was an unforgettable insult. The scheme has since spread to 144 countries and boosted the self-esteem of some eight million young people who have taken part.
The prince’s contribution to the 784 other organisations with which he was associated over the years was also immense. But his most important contribution was always as the Queen’s ‘strength and stay’, as she described him on their golden wedding anniversary in 1997, the essential support on which her singularly successful reign for so long depended. ‘She couldn’t have picked a better man,’ Lord Mountbatten assured the prime minister Clement Attlee at the time of their marriage.
‘He had a very wholesome effect on her,’ remarked a British diplomat who observed the couple at close quarters in Athens in 1950. ‘She had a protective shell around her and he brought her out of it. He helped to make her what she’s become. We are extremely fortunate that he married her.’ More than seven decades later, it’s hard to argue with either of those assessments.
Hugo Vickers: 'Back to his royal roots'
Hugo Vickers is a broadcaster and biographer of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother
At Buckingham Palace, Prince Philip occupied a suite of rooms on the first floor on the Constitution Hill side. These had been King George VI’s rooms, which the Queen had most tactfully given to Philip after the Queen Mother moved out early in 1953. The first room was the library created for King Edward VII (where Prince Philip’s trusted archivist, Dame Anne Griffiths, worked until her death in 2017). This room was filled with books and often with works of art on their way here and there, plus papers from his extensive archive.
A small door opened into an enormous drawing room, again lined with books: the shelves contained more books on religion and ornithology than any other subject, though every now and again something surprising could be spotted – a biography of Marlene Dietrich, sent by the author as a gift. Prince Philip also liked history – he was suspicious of novels and tended to avoid them. His huge drawing room had some rather utilitarian chairs and a table, and here he would hold meetings. Beyond that was his study, with Philip de László portraits of his parents, Prince and Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark, and of his grandfather Prince Louis of Battenberg. There was a nice image of Prince Edward as a little boy, by June Mendoza.
Beyond that was his bedroom – and further on were the Queen’s rooms. All these were also accessed from a long corridor, and you could tell if he or the Queen were there, as there would be a page waiting outside the door.
It was into the large drawing room that I was ushered by Sir Brian McGrath to talk to Prince Philip about his mother, Princess Andrew of Greece, in 1997. I did not know him, but I had met him a few times. My prejudice was to think of him as forbidding in manner. Once at an event at the Royal Festival Hall, he had asked me what I was writing. I told him: a book on Vivien Leigh. He asked me why. I replied that I thought I could do a better job than the previous books about her. He said: ‘Really?’ And I remember expecting him to add: ‘You conceited little whipper-snapper. What on earth made you think you were better than the other writers!’ He said no such thing. Maybe he was happy with the answer.
My book on his mother came about because both his sister Princess George of Hanover and the Queen thought her story should be told while there were survivors who could help. He was reluctant initially, but they persuaded him and I was chosen for the task. Sir Brian introduced me and then left me with him. Here I saw an unexpected side to Prince Philip. He seemed almost shy to be left alone with me – as though the presence of his private secretary would have protected him. I decided that my best approach was to ask him about all sorts of other characters in the story and not about his mother at all. We chatted easily, and as I had hoped, he gradually came to talk about her – she arrived naturally and happily in the conversation. Later, I went down and saw Sir Brian. ‘How did it go?’ he asked. I said I thought it was all right, though never easy to talk about anyone’s mother. He looked at his watch. ‘Well, you were with him for an hour. If it hadn’t gone well, you’d have been out in 10 minutes.’
I learnt about Prince Philip from that talk and from the questions I later submitted to him in writing – not to mention the comments he added to my manuscript. I detected that he was uncomfortable talking about the past and I think if any one of us had had his past, we would have felt the same. He was born in Corfu in 1921, famously on the dining-room table at Mon Repos – the royal summer residence. He was the longed-for son, born years after his four sisters, who had arrived between 1905 and 1914. He was spirited away from Greece before he was two years old, in an orange box.
His early years were spent in exile in Paris, the family torn from their duty as Greek royals, living on the bounty of rich relations. Luckily for them, these existed. Princess George of Greece (formerly Princess Marie Bonaparte) was descended from François Blanc, who had owned the casino in Monte Carlo. She had a huge fortune and housed Prince and Princess Andrew and their five children at her property in the Paris suburb of St Cloud between 1923 and 1929. Lord Mountbatten’s rich wife, Edwina, paid for Philip’s education.
Prince Philip held his father in high esteem. When, in respect of his mother’s illness in the early 1930s, I wrote that Prince Andrew had ‘surrendered the role of husband and father’, he came back with: ‘Nonsense – I had a three-day holiday with him every summer.’ He convinced me that he thought his father was a good father, but he did not convince me that he was actually a good father. He bridled at every description of him – I was finally allowed to call him a 'boulevardier’, a wealthy, fashionable socialite, which was a politely generous description. Exiled in 1922, having nearly been shot by the Greek government over the Greco-Turkish War, Prince Andrew cut a debonair figure with his monocle, heading to The Ritz in Paris for drinks with his cronies. It is hard to see him as anything other than a depressed man keeping up appearances.
Prince Philip’s relationship with his mother was more complicated. She adored him, but she was almost deaf, rather remote and increasingly isolated during those years. The First World War had overthrown every aspect of the life she accepted as normal. Apart from exile from Greece, she had lost two of her aunts – Alexandra, the Tsarina of Russia, executed with her entire family, and Ella (Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia), thrown down a mineshaft, singing hymns until she died. Her uncle the Grand Duke of Hesse ceased to rule in Darmstadt, and many other German relations lost their thrones. She turned to religion, suffered a crisis and in due course was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She was in a clinic in Switzerland for two years, then drifted around Europe. Prince Philip saw her only twice in eight years and received no birthday cards from her, or any other communication, until 1937. He told me: ‘My mother was ill; my father was away. I had to get on with it.’ This was the philosophy that stood him in such good stead throughout life.
Prince Andrew drifted off to the South of France to a yet more pointless existence and the four sisters were swiftly married to German princes (all within a year). Philip was raised by his admirable grandmother Victoria Mountbatten, Marchioness of Milford Haven, a redoubtable figure with a fine brain (a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she lived in an apartment at Kensington Palace). He had no home. He was sent from relation to relation. Sometimes he would be found having lunch on a Sunday with his grandmother in Egham – she took him to stay with her sister in northern Germany when his father could not organise himself to have his boy for the summer.
School suited him. He flourished at Gordonstoun in Scotland. He became independent. He grew up as good-looking as a Greek god. He was athletic and self-propelled. Tragedy struck in 1937 when his sister Cecilie was killed in an air accident with her two sons, her husband and her mother-in-law – the plane hit a factory chimney in fog at Ostend. He minded all the more because Cecilie was pregnant at the time. The baby boy was born in the trauma of the accident and he died with his family. (This incident was turned wickedly against Prince Philip in an especially evil episode of The Crown.) He travelled to Darmstadt with his father for the funeral.
At this point his mother returned to the family fold, and for a time he lived with her in Athens. It tends to be forgotten that if Princess Frederica had not given birth to her son Constantine II in 1940, and had family members not lived to the ages they did, Prince Philip would have become king of Greece in March 1964. He could never have married the Queen. His mother wanted to keep him in Greece, but King George II of Greece, King George VI and Lord Mountbatten wanted him in the Royal Navy, so he entered Dartmouth, met Princess Elizabeth for the second time, and went on to serve gallantly in the Second World War, eventually in the Far East.
His family conspired to make it as easy as possible for him to marry Princess Elizabeth. He did not object to my writing: ‘They loaded the gun for him, but left him to pull the trigger.’ They knew he had to make up his own mind. An extraordinary marriage of more than 73 years followed, unconventional in some ways, but sustained by deep mutual loyalty – supportive like two fine oak trees standing side by side.
Prince Philip loved the Navy. He wished to follow the examples of his grandfather Prince Louis of Battenberg and his uncle Lord Mountbatten, and no one doubts that he could have been First Sea Lord. He and Princess Elizabeth loved the carefree days they spent in Malta, where Prince Philip was stationed from 1949 to 1951, but all that ended in February 1952 with the sudden, though not entirely unexpected, death of George VI at the age of 56. It was said at the time that it looked as though the world had fallen onto Prince Philip’s shoulders – he lost his career and his whole life changed.
But here his pragmatic approach served him well. His main focus was on supporting the Queen. He relieved her of the running of the royal estates. He used to say that, unlike other men, he did not have to earn his living or support his family, so he was free to explore other projects. I do not subscribe to the view that he hated walking two steps behind the Queen. Unlike Prince Claus of the Netherlands (who suffered from depression) or Prince Henrik of Denmark (who was less than supportive to his queen in many ways), Prince Philip had been brought up as a relatively minor member of the Greek royal family. He knew the system and he worked within it – and, in a way, around it. When he went to Paris on the Queen’s state visit of 1972, he made a speech to the Chambre de Commerce. No one would have listened to him if he had been but a minor prince and naval officer.
Much has been written about the many schemes he set up, his early awareness of the need to save the planet, his support for green issues and conservation. He was a man ahead of his time. One of his early projects was the Commonwealth Study Conference in Oxford in 1956, set up to look at the impact of industrial towns on their citizens. He realised, having visited many factories, that he wanted to ameliorate the living and recreational conditions of those who worked in them. Only when his papers are made available will we learn the full extent of all he achieved.
I feel lucky to have seen him regularly since 1996. He never mentioned my book on his mother after it came out (and I was equally determined never to mention it to him). But he was totally consistent. You knew where you were with him. He cared not a jot for what people thought of him. He got on with the job.
Twice I sat and chatted with him after dinner, when he was in a receptive mood (he wasn’t always) and you could say anything to him. He laughed as I took him through the life of a woman called Rosemarie Kanzler, who started out as a manicurist and, through love affairs and judicious marriages, ended up as one of the richest women in the world. When the story was over, I heard him say, under his breath, one word, ‘Pointless’, and I thought, of course he would find such a life pointless – she was a taker, while he was forever putting something into life.
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